In Conversation: Amanda Bennetts on the Gaps Between Flesh and Data
- Amy Jiang
- 22 hours ago
- 6 min read
In the feedback loops of machine learning, certain bodies, cultures, and ways of knowing are made visible, distorted, or erased. Like ghosts—excluded yet ever-present—they haunt the machine. They slip through algorithmic blind spots, bend systems’ logic, and disrupt with glitches and ruptures that unsettle computational control. But ghosts don’t just haunt—they rewire. They assert presence, reframe meaning, and speak in forms the system was never trained to understand. Through cracks in the loop, they reemerge as designers of new imaginaries for themselves and for the communities the system failed to see. Ghosts in the Feedback Loop is a virtual exhibition that invites artists to work inside those cracks—to treat algorithmic systems not as endpoints of automation but as haunted infrastructures alive with memory, loss, and rebellion. This interview is part of TechnoMirage, UAAD’s latest curatorial & publishing project exploring the intersections of artificial intelligence, speculative design, and collective imagination. Emerging from a multi-format event series—including a virtual exhibition, an online panel co-hosted with Parsons, and an IRL gathering of workshops, talks, and performances—the publication extends these dialogues into an archival form.
About the Artists
Amanda Bennetts is an Australian new media and installation artist whose work bridges art, science, and technology. Living with progressive neurological and rare muscular diseases, she draws on lived experience to critically examine care, health, and wellness. Since graduating from QCA in 2022, Bennetts has held solo exhibitions at Outer Space, Firstdraft, and Metro Arts and was a finalist in the 2023 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize. Internationally, she has presented at Ars Electronica and Berlin’s CTM Festival. In 2024, her film Carve Crevice From Grace, commissioned by Accessible Arts and the Sydney Opera House, premiered at the iconic venue.
Q: Could you tell us a bit about your background, and how your work connects to the theme “Ghosts in the Feedback Loop”?
I am an Australian artist whose practice is grounded in the lived experience of a body in flux, shaped by multiple sclerosis and a recently diagnosed rare muscular disease. Positioning the body as a critical site for artistic inquiry, my practice examines how digital, medical, and social infrastructures shape, optimize, and reimagine bodies. Using my extensive medical data profile, I ask what my data can reveal once it is freed from outlier status and removed from third-party health data frameworks. Can emerging technologies genuinely make a person’s health visible and understood? Yet detaching my dataset from extractive systems does not solve the problem of quantification or the pull of normative metrics. The numbers still mark me as an outlier, generating a digital double that diverges from how I feel.
My experimental film Latency + Lacerations tracks an undersea cable from data center to the Pacific Ocean’s shoreline, attending to a body under measurement. Between flesh and data, the work is an ontological séance, a performed ritual that reveals the gap where my body and its data ghost misalign, exposing the invisible infrastructures that mediate technological care and algorithmic surveillance.
Q: How do you perceive AI—as a tool, a collaborator, a medium, a subject, or something else? And how does that shape your artistic process?
Subject, for sure. Beyond the noise around generative AI and its impact, as a person with chronic illness and a disability, I see a quieter but more profound upheaval happening in AI and healthcare. It is both exciting and unsettling, so I approach it with caution. In my practice, I ask: who will have access to these technologies, especially when they are built and trained on the lived experiences and data of ill people? Will healthcare remain a universal system, or drift further into a privatized model where corporations own the tools, take our data, and set the terms? I hope my work sits in that tension, pushing for patient-driven care and agency rather than potentially exploitative platform-driven care. As an artist, I may not provide any answers, but I hope these difficult questions stay visible by exposing the systems and infrastructures.
Q: What futures does your featured work gesture toward or warn against? Who do you imagine as your audience, and how do you hope they are impacted?
I guess, in a way, the film looks at how our data already moves through hidden networks that shape daily life. Platforms extract our data and sell it back as empirical science or as targeted ads and content, all of which have visceral consequences. I hope the work pushes back against optimization for its own sake, profit-driven digital care, wellness as extraction, and the slide toward privatization. More broadly, I question treating data and health wearables as science: assumptions and averages set a single “normal” that misfits many, particularly the chronically ill and people with disabilities. I want the work to linger in the gap between lived experience and its data double, arguing for alternatives that give people agency over their data, its uses, and the AI systems it feeds. In this sense, my audience is anyone with a body who may encounter systems that categorize, quantify, and compare their data.
Q: Are there particular communities, histories, or environments your work remains in conversation with? How do those relationships evolve over time?
Generally, my work is in discussion with bodies shaped by measurement: people with disabilities, people living with chronic illness, carers and clinicians, and artists and tinkerers testing new access futures. I’m also in dialogue with sites that analyze the body every day, like hospitals, data centers, and cable-landing sites, and always, the long histories of medicalization, wellness industries, and extraction sit in the background of my work.
My inquiry into AI and its use in healthcare began with Stealth Care: Wellness from the Algorithm, an immersive installation that emerged from a year of research at Ars Electronica’s Founding Lab, pairing machine-learning analysis with an N=1 study of my own body. The project combined EMG wearables, qualitative data, and machine learning with the aim of predicting patterns in fatigue and rest. Crucially, only my data trained the AI, rather than normative health metrics that often treat my data as an outlier to the norm. Those signals were then imagined into a speculative wellness spa that re-embodied my data through cymatics, oscilloscopes, and water elements to question how care might be felt rather than only measured, and to ask: can the quantified self serve the ill body?
Since then, the exploration has continued through collaboration with data scientists, where we have co-researched and completed studies into biological data and the uses of data separated from comparative models. This line of inquiry flows into work like Latency + Lacerations, which follows a cable route and data center to ask how hidden infrastructures mediate technological care. Across these projects, I keep the focus on the potentials of empowerment in relation to data agency, aiming to make space for bodies that sit outside “normal” metrics.
Q: What do you see as the most urgent threats or uncertainties we may face in the coming decade with the rise of AI?
For me, as a person with chronic illness and a disability, the real unknowns lie in how AI will shape healthcare. I’m excited by what it could unlock, from drug discoveries to earlier diagnoses, but I’m skeptical of the ethics and power behind it: who it serves, who it sidelines, and on whose consent it operates. The main question for me is legibility—what does it mean for a body to be made knowable to computational and algorithmic systems, and what gets stripped away to make it fit within the datasets?
Q: Are there any theories, books, or artists you’d like to recommend in your current areas of interest?
Anything from Aksioma.org is worth exploring. It’s a Slovenian institution that fosters critical discourse with relevant thinkers and experts and offers timely insight into how contemporary society and new technologies shape our experience of the world. If you can, pay the postage for a physical copy of their publications so you have something tactile and haptic in hand, it’s worth it. :)
Credits
Research and conceptual development for this film was funded by the R|Artist Residency: Urban Ecologies, presented by SCCA through The Refinery in partnership with the Creative Ecologies Research Cluster at UniSC.
Lead Editor: Amy Xiaofan Jiang
Assistant Editor: Paridhi Garg
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